To paraphrase George Orwell, I have no particular love for the idealized ‘parent’ as he appears in the bourgeois mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood parent in conflict with his natural enemy, the rat, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

“But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
— Barack Hussein Obama, 6 April 2008

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880, translated from the French by Edward Aveling

In 1994, “gerontotechnical consultant” Hanna Meyer-Hentschel developed a suit that enables the young and fit to see what it’s like to be old and frail.

In its second iteration, the 2003 model of the Age Explorer is meant to simulate how the body might behave at the age of 70. The suit’s overalls are weighed down by 13 pounds of ballast sewn into them and stiffened at the joints by pads strapped to the elbows and knees. Walking across a large room wearing the suit becomes a slow, exhausting experience. The Age Explorer gloves have a Velcro-like lining that imitates the effect of arthritis by translating pressure applied to the hand into a multitude of pinpricks. Headphones inhibit the wearer’s hearing, while a yellow face shield blurs his outlook and blocks his peripheral vision. The company expects its next product to mimic confusion and interrupted thought processescommon among the elderly.